XIXAX Film Forum

Film Discussion => In Front of the Camera => Topic started by: Tiff on June 09, 2003, 11:21:34 PM

Title: Billy Bob Thornton
Post by: Tiff on June 09, 2003, 11:21:34 PM

i just saw sling blade two nights ago, which i really loved and i think he's a great actor. some say he's neurotic and others (i think it was some director, not sure who exactly) say he's a hillbilly orson welles. what do you guys think? this'll be interestin'.

A friend of mine went to Austin a few weeks ago and BBT was there working on a movie. While my friend wanted to respect Billy Bob's privacy, he also wanted to say hi - so he did, and he said that Billy Bob was very VERY cordial and appreciative of the fans that approached him.

That stuff can get to anyone - you can get so much admiration and finally you just want some privacy. I can totally understand that. The fact that Billy Bob didn't shy away from the public and embraced them - spending 10 or 15 minutes talking with my friend. That's just stinking cool.

One of the guys in JMJ's first film was Matt Damon's stand-in for 'All The Pretty Horses,' and he said Billy Bob is the nicest, most down to earth director you could imagine. He treated the entire crew, from the extras to the DP to the PAs with the same amount of respect and friendliness, and would take them all bowling. That made me like him even more. His album, however, wasn't exactly my cup of tea.

Bad Santa star Billy Bob Thornton is in talks with Universal and Imagine to star in the Peter Berg-directed Friday Night Lights, an adaptation of the H.G. Bissinger book being produced by Brian Grazer.

Thornton would play the head coach of a high school gridiron team that is the obsession of the town's inhabitants. The book chronicles an entire season of the Permian High Panthers, a team whose success was inordinately important to the inhabitants of Odessa, Texas. The town was in severe economic despair, and the townsfolk looked to the team's success for inspiration each Friday night.

Grazer has been trying for 15 years to turn Bissinger's book into a film. He originally planned to make it with the late director Alan J. Pakula. Berg came aboard during the summer, after he directed The Rundown, and has done a rewrite of a script by David Aaron Cohen.

He was really nice and engaging on the phone interview I (and about 20 other pushy college reporter-wannabes) had with him, didn't show a hint of annoyance at all, and it was a very annoying phone call, with all these kids asking mundane questions, and talking over each other. Still, he was calm the whole time and answered each question with humor and honesty. I think he said all he wanted for Christmas was a pencil and some soup.

He was really nice and engaging on the phone interview I (and about 20 other pushy college reporter-wannabes) had with him, didn't show a hint of annoyance at all, and it was a very annoying phone call, with all these kids asking mundane questions, and talking over each other. Still, he was calm the whole time and answered each question with humor and honesty. I think he said all he wanted for Christmas was a pencil and some soup.

I think he is a very talented actor, but some of his most recent roles are kinda freaking me out. They're pretty trashy roles, in pretty bad movies. Like bad santa, I haven't seen it and I refuse to. And that other movie waking up in reno. gahhhh! ghastly.hopefully these kinda mistakes won't happen again.

Billy Bob Thornton and Kate Beckinsale (Van Helsing) are near deals to star in Fade Out, a thriller written by Michael Cristofer, says Variety. Cristofer will direct, and shooting begins June 28 in Nova Scotia.

Thornton will play a screenwriter with schizophrenia. He lives with his wife (Beckinsale) in a desolate New England coastal town and when he begins to write a script that mirrors his everyday life, the lines blur between fiction and reality.

Thornton will start the film right after finishing the Harold Ramis-directed Ice Harvest. Beckinsale will next be seen in The Aviator. Cristofer most recently wrote Casanova, the Lasse Hallstrom-directed film that stars Heath Ledger.

After the boxoffice success of "Bad Santa," Billy Bob Thornton is prepping to add a new name to his resume: "Mr. Woodcock."

The actor has signed to star in the New Line Cinema comedy for helmer Craig Gillespie and Bob Cooper's Landscape Pictures. The script centers on a young man who returns to his hometown to stop his mother from marrying his old high school gym teacher (Thornton), who made life a living hell for him and many of his classmates.

Michael Carnes and Josh Gilbert penned the screenplay. Cooper will produce, with Brian Inerfeld and Karen Lunder serving as co-producers. At the studio, executives Kent Alterman, Michele Weiss and Keith Goldberg are overseeing for production topper Toby Emmerich.

The role is the second high school-based project for Thornton this year. He recently finished a starring role in the football tale "Friday Night Lights" for Universal Pictures. He also will be seen in "Ice Harvest" for Focus Features. The multihyphenate also has the redo of "The Bad News Bears" for Paramount Pictures on his shooting schedule for this year.

Milla Jovovich is teaming with Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Cristofer for the feature "Fade Out." The actress has signed on for the film, which Cristofer is directing from his script. Shooting starts May 15 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Thornton has been attached to the project since early this year along with Kate Beckinsale, who has since dropped out. Described as a Hitchcockian thriller, "Fade Out" follows the story of a screenwriter (Thornton) with a history of mental illness who suspects his wife (Jovovich) of infidelity only to find her missing. When he begins to write a script about his suspicions of her whereabouts, he loses the ability to tell the difference between reality and the plot of the project he's working on.

Billy Bob Thornton has signed on to star in the feature film adaptation of "Peace Like a River" for Warner Bros. Pictures.

Brad Pitt will produce for Plan B, with David Brown and Kit Golden producing through their Manhattan Project shingle. Plan B's Kristin Hahn will serve as the executive producer. Alicia Sams is the co-producer, and Courtenay Valenti is overseeing for Warners.

Based on the book by Leif Enger, "Peace" is a tale of loyalty and revenge that revolves around an American family that gets into a deadly spat with some neighborhood thugs. Kathy McWorter wrote the screenplay. No director is in place.

Prior to his tabloid-worthy exploits as a five-time divorcee and all-around eccentric, Billy Bob Thornton earned the right be weird by becoming one of modern movies' most esteemed entertainers. After suffering through genre dreck like Chopper Chicks in Zombietown and Going Overboard, Thornton broke through as an indie filmmaker and actor with the acclaimed, suspense-filled drama One False Move; four years and countless forgettable films later, he officially 'arrived' in Hollywood with a powerhouse directorial debut, Sling Blade, and proved that country boys from Arkansas can tell stories just as effectively as Tinseltown's city slicker screenwriters.

On June 7, Thornton released a director's cut of the film, which features more than 22 minutes of extra footage, along with a wealth of archival material recounting the filmmaker's days as a struggling Hollywood thespian, and his meteoric rise to success. At the DVD's recent release party, the actor-director polyhyphenate discussed this new version of his modern classic; Thornton's characteristic candor shone through as he revealed the origins of this previously unreleased footage.

"There are only three or four scenes," Thornton says of the added footage as tape recorders attempt desperately to capture the actor's fragmented comments over the din of a roiling fete. "They are scenes that we were able to lift from the movie, sort of surgically remove, that didn't hurt the story at all. You don't miss them, but they're nice to see just because it's more character development." Thornton's last effort as a director was 2001's Daddy and Them, which never saw wide release; one expects that he was happy to have the opportunity to see any of his efforts, much less the thus-far zenith of his career, enjoy not only a theatrical run but an expansive life on DVD.

"You get to see little bridges between scenes," he reveals. "Like for instance there's a scene where Dwight Yoakam's terrible band plays in the back yard and he makes John Ritter and me go to the liquor store with him for the guys. And then from the yard, we cut to the living room and that's where we have a big fight. Now there's a scene in between that where we show him driving to the liquor store- you know, stuff like that."

Despite Thornton's confession that the extended edition of his masterpiece may be little more than a clever marketing ploy, he insists that the addenda does serve a purpose for diehard fans of the film. "I think those kinds of things are really more interesting for hardcore fans of the movie," he says. "For instance, I'm sort of a record [collector], and I always read the liner notes and everything. I think a DVD like this, and a director's cut, it's really more interesting for the really hardcore fans of a movie or a record or whatever it is, because I don't miss these scenes from the movie."

"They're good scenes, I think."

At the same time, he acknowledges that the new material is not necessary to effectively tell Carl Childers' story, even if it is interesting. "You just put stuff back in there that you threw on the floor before and it makes the movie shorter without interrupting the story," he admits. "Now, if I thought those scenes were essential to get my point across, I would have left them in." He also says he probably could have included them in the theatrical release if he'd wanted. "At that time, I was a little more under-the-radar and they didn't mess with me so much, so I probably could have gotten by with it, because I had final cut."

Revisiting Sling Blade forced Thonton to revisit footage featuring a pair of longtime friends and collaborators, the late J.T. Walsh and John Ritter. He says it was tough to go back and see their work, but enjoys knowing that their work is preserved for antiquity on film. "J.T. and John were two of my best friends and it was so shocking that they died," he says. "They were about the same age and it happened kind of the same way, unexpectedly, so yeah, it's kind of sad to look at that. But thank God we've got stuff like this to look at, so that they can stay alive in a way."

This kind of reflection also offers a unique chance in general for filmmakers to correct past mistakes, or at the least reconsider creative choices made at different points in their career. But Thornton says that he is completely happy with the original version. "I don't make mistakes in movies," he says. "I know that sounds really arrogant, but what I mean by that is that I do exactly what I felt at the time. I've never regretted anything I've done. I've regretted doing a couple of movies, but I didn't regret what I did in them, because that's what I felt at the time. But as a director, you really can't regret."

He nevertheless offers an example of footage -which was originally excised from the film- where he felt there were deficiencies. "There's a scene in there that we put back in that we had to rush up because we had no money and no time," he remembers. "It's a scene where the little boy goes over to see this girl he likes; it's a subplot we cut out of the movie, and I put it back in for the hell of it because we had it. We rushed up that day because it was about to rain, and I didn't really have time to work with her. So yeah, that's a mistake I made; I should have really shortened the scene so I could work with her more. [But] you wouldn't know if I hadn't pointed it out," he observes.

That said, Thornton asserts that he is no perfectionist when it comes to directing. "I'm not a technical director anyway," he says. "I put the camera in the room, I get a good frame where I can see everybody, I don't want it to look pink like one of those Showtime movies in the middle of the night, I make sure the color's good with the guys in post-production, [and] I try to edit the movie in a way that lets it breathe, where you get the character development. And that's about what I do. I really work with the actors to make sure that the story is good and solid, and that's [it]."

His relatively simple approach to directing is also why the filmmaker prefers character studies to studio blockbusters. "That's also why I've never done a movie like Star Wars. If they asked me to direct one of those films, I wouldn't have the slightest clue of even where to begin."

"So when I say that, that's what I mean," he clarifies casually. "I just do it the way I feel it."

Billy Bob Thornton is putting on his spacesuit to star in "The Astronaut Farmer," a drama by Mark and Michael Polish for Warner Independent Pictures. The story follows an eccentric farmer who dreams of space travel and sets out to build a rocket inside his barn. His neighbors consider him an oddity, the government thinks he is a threat, and the media sees him as a story. "Farmer" is being directed by Michael Polish from a script written by the two brothers. Mark Polish is producing along with Paula Weinstein and Len Amato.

The multihyphenate is on board to develop "Floyd Collins" as a feature film for Paramount Pictures and will helm and star in the drama. Thornton's manager, Geyer Kosinski, is producing through his Media Talent Group.

Set in 1925, the drama centers on the true-life story of cave explorer Floyd Collins' entrapment in a Kentucky cavern and the ensuing 13-day news frenzy.

The story marked one of the first large-scale media spectacles, provoking hourly radio bulletins and garnering nationwide newspaper headlines. The project is described as being particularly relevant today because it echoes modern-day mining accidents and 24-hour news cycles.

Thornton's longtime writing partner Tom Epperson adapted the screenplay from the book "Trapped!: The Story of Floyd Collins" by Robert Murray and Roger Brucker.

Kosinski and Thornton optioned the book and brought the material to Paramount. Bruce Heller and David Bushell also are producing.

Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger and Brandon Routh are in various stages of negotiations to star in the ensemble "The Informers," an adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel. Gregor Jordan is directing the drama, which is being financed by Senator International. Senator's Marco Weber is producing.

One False Move and Sling Blade are films I would recommend to anyone. They are both set in rural areas and have simple plots. Characters have simple goals, which drive them one way or another toward resolutions that are morally ambiguous.

I don't have any recommendations, haven't seen anything he's directed. But while you're on a Billy Bob kick give this a shot, it's the performance I most remember him for, and it will make your skin crawl:

I haven't seen anything else he's directed, but he's done 3 others- All The Pretty Horses, Daddy and Them, and Jayne Mansfield's Car. None of them seem very interesting based on their synopsis, but He's been talking about Mansfield forever and it kind of came and went so I'd like to see what that's about...someday.

If you're looking for more classic Bill, check out Sam Raimi's "A Simple Plan". Hands down, his best performance after Sling Blade. Even though I haven't been watching, I'm really happy to see "Fargo" give him the opportunity to be a great actor again. Speaking of Coen's "The Man Who Wasn't There" is his third best.

Will happily second Reelist's recommendation of Simple Plan and MWWT. He's also really good in the movie version of Friday Night Lights. Can't wait to see the Fargo TV show once it's on Netflix or something, I've purposefully stayed out of the thread on here, but been hearing really good things regardless.